Introducing the dissident frogman, version 3.0. Larger, stronger, with even more hell-raiser-live-free-or-die tattoos and more napalm-pisser hair on the chest. The Me(1) is back.

It took way much longer than I expected, and at times, it felt like it would never happen. Indeed, I hope that your past 18 months were nowhere near as crappy as mine.

And I'm not just talking about the time when I lost the (nearly complete) design, due to a flawed file transfer, and then there was no recent (enough) backup available, and I almost drown under that huge gut-wrenching wave of discouragement, you know, the sort that makes you really sick in your stomach at the thought of all the work that's lost, and all the work that needs to be done again if you ever mean to get back to where you were right before you pushed the horrible, horrible button of death, two.frikkin'.minutes.ago. Plus you know that blaming God is not really going to help anyway, no matter how good it may temporarily feel to put the responsibility on someone else.

I must confess that at this point, I sat back, opened a can of Bud(2), took a long sip and thought: “Okay, that's it. I'm done with this effin' frogman thing. I'm not doing all this stuff again. It's dead. The frogman is DEAD. Dead as a Dodo retired in France and "enjoying" its Social Security regime.”

The odd thing however, was that even though I had pretty much stopped putting anything of value on the blog for long periods of time, I was still getting emails from total strangers telling me how much they loved the site, and how they wished I'd start posting again.

Including, yes, that one from Suzie, telling me among other things that my my sense of humor helped her many times going through her teenage son's death. If Suzie reads this, as I hope, I wish to let her know that in addition to making me the honor of sharing such personal grief, she managed to render me totally speechless (yep, that's quite an exploit) — You see, with my level of written English it's quite easy to crack a joke every now and then, but it's a completely different story to answer such a tragedy at such a personal level. Somehow, "Thanks for your email, I feel sorry for your loss." sounds more insulting than anything else.

So as you read this, I'd like to ask you to spare a thought or a prayer for Suzie, and her departed son, whom I will not name here, unless Suzie allows me so.

Passed the emotion, the next question was: "Sure, it's just a blog, among millions of blogs, and there is a lot of brilliant and funny people out there to make out for the void, if I am to leave any void at all. But how the hell could I quit on someone like Suzie?"

And how do you quit on people you've never known, telling you how they miss you?

That made it. Those isolated emails were the sparks I needed to get back to work, and rebuild the whole thing, almost from the ground up.

So if you read this, and are happy to see me again, don't thank me: thank Suzie and a few other people with her.

They did all the serious work.

It's just that it's shorter than "the dissident frogman". And it has a rather more "personal" feel to it. You know, less of that "Oh, he's talking about himself at the third person again.”

If — and I mean "if" — I feel like drinking some alcoholic beverage while working, which is very rarely (and in fact, only when I've just lost several months worth of work), I use to drink Bud. That's because it's very light, and therefore never turns me into a drooling imbecile after the first half of the bottle. I have many good things to say about America, as you know if you're a regular around, but I have to admit that Monty Pythons were spot on with their joke "(American beer) is like making love in a canoe(3)". Not that there is anything wrong with that, as far as I am concerned(4).

"It's fucking close to water", for those of you who don't know their classics.

The beer, I mean. As for the rest, I'm a frogman. I'm totally in my element with any activity involving large volumes of water, in a canoe or under it(5).